The Dish

Read this story from the NYT today, detailing the chaos and violence now engulfing several major Iraqi cities. This country cannot be put together again. And its spiral toward chaos is increasing in velocity, not decreasing.

In my view, last Tuesday’s revelation of the GOP as a proudly pro-torture party marks the moment when they have become a danger to national security and to the integrity of American democracy. I’m not the only one appalled by what has happened to Republicanism that it could have degenerated into a party of Hollywood-inspired thuggery and lawlessness. Among others are the commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999 and the commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994. They know more about warfare and torture than Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani ever could. And like every senior military official, they strongly oppose the authorization of torture as American policy. Because they want to win the war. Money quote:

As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb. Our soldiers in Iraq confront real "ticking time bomb" situations every day, in the form of improvised explosive devices, and any degree of "flexibility" about torture at the top drops down the chain of command like a stone — the rare exception fast becoming the rule…

This has had disastrous consequences.

Read the whole thing. It’s vital to grasp that torture is not only evil, illegal and criminal. It is also the greatest gift we have given bin Laden since 9/11.

(Photo: An Iranian couple walk past mural paintings depicting scenes from the torture of Iraqi prisoners by US soldiers at the Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, on a major highway in the Iranian capital Tehran 01 June 2004. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty.)

Ron Paul was not hallucinating. Here’s a speech from the monster – whom Bush has failed to kill or capture – in October 2001, justifying the 9/11 attack:

Millions of innocent children are being killed as I speak. They are being killed in Iraq without committing any sins, and we don’t hear condemnation or a fatwa (religious decree) from the rulers…

When people at the ends of the earth, Japan, were killed by their hundreds of thousands, young and old, it was not considered a war crime, it is something that has justification. Millions of children in Iraq is something that has justification. But when they lose dozens of people in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam (capitals of Kenya and Tanzania, where U.S. embassies were bombed in 1998), Iraq was struck and Afghanistan was struck.

As I have said before, I don’t believe this was a necessary or sufficient reason for al Qaeda to strike on 9/11. Their theology is sufficient. I don’t believe that we did anything to "deserve" 9/11. But I do believe that in fighting enemies, we do well to listen to them, to understand their motives, in order better to defeat them. Let me quote someone who agrees with me:

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say? America and our coalition partners have made our choice. We’re taking the words of the enemy seriously.

That’s the president. So should we listen to OBL in trying to understand the motivations for his actions? Or shouldn’t we? I’m confused. And should those who listen be ruled thereby inadmissable to primary debates? It appears so.

(Hat tip: Anonymous Liberal).

I don’t agree with all of this, but it is worth airing. There is more potential support for his position among Republicans, conservatives and independents than some now think. Listen to the applause at the end. They’re not leftists.

A reader writes:

You wrote:

"There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to stand for days on end, or hooded and strapped to shackles in a ceiling, or having his legs pulpified by repeated beating, or forced to eat pork and drink alcohol against religious strictures."

I’d say that there is only one state more abject than that. The torturer, who has voluntarily abdicated his humanity and actively works to destroy the freedom of his brothers and sisters. And that pitiful state is exactly what we’re being reduced to.

Here’s an image to get Second Amendment fans all worked up. If you look real close, you’ll see they’re all guns. There are 29,569 of them – one for every person killed by a gun in America in 2004. The photographer, Chris Jordan, specializes in large photos of massive amounts of objects – from cell-phones to plastic bottles to vicodin pills. His way cool website is here.

The Rove machine creaks into action. He really must be a threat, mustn’t he?

One defensive reply from those who favor legalizing and authorizing torture of military detainees is that those of us who oppose it are preening morally or subject to moral vanity. Unfortunately, when you passionately oppose an absolute moral evil, it is very hard to avoid such an impression. All I can say is that I do not think of myself as a moral exemplar in any way. I’m a guilt-ridden, self-hating Catholic who was nonetheless brought up to believe as a matter of fundamental morality that torturing another human being – the deliberate infliction of cruelty and suffering on a defenseless person – is categorically evil. Nothing can make it good. It cannot be placed in a utilitarian context, because its violation of human dignity is so grave it is an absolute evil. This, by the way, is not a marginal position for a Christian. No Christian church, authority or theologian justifies torture. Christianity condemns it without reservation. And the fact that the church itself has inflicted torture in the past has perhaps helped to make this stricture absolute.

But for those who believe such a moral argument is somehow inherently self-righteous, let me try another tack. In a constitutional democracy based on the unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the abolition of torture in wartime was a defining mark of America. Washington himself set the moral standard and insisted on humane treatment of all military prisoners – as a defining mark of a new civilization. And the connection between liberty and torture is a very close one. There is no human being who has less liberty than a person being tortured …

Even a prisoner in a small cell can stand and walk a little, can breathe on his own, has the capacity to tend to his own bodily functions, and to think or pray. Torture is designed to rob him of all these last shreds of liberty. It takes control of his body and soul and by the use of physical or psychological coercion, rids him of any real freedom at all. It puts him into the abyss of tyranny on a personal scale. And any man or woman who is given the license to torture and any man or woman who grants the right to torture is definitionally a tyrant over another person. There is no state more abject than the man broken on the waterboarding rack, or frozen to near death, or forced to stand for days on end, or hooded and strapped to shackles in a ceiling, or having his legs pulpified by repeated beating, or forced to eat pork and drink alcohol against religious strictures. Everything I have just described has been done by US forces under the command and direction of George W. Bush. They are all acts of absolute tyanny, conducted by people who at that moment are absolute tyrants.

The evil of torture is therefore not just a moral one. It is a political one. A constitutional republic dedicated before everything to the protection of liberty cannot legalize torture and remain a constitutional republic. It imports into itself a tumor of pure tyranny. That tumor, we know from history, always always spreads, as it has spread in the US military these past shameful years. The fact that hefty proportions of US soldiers now support its use as a routine matter reveals how deep the rot has already gone. The fact that now a majority of Republican candidates proudly support such torture has rendered the GOP the party most inimical to liberty in America. When you combine torture’s evil with the claims of the hard right that a president can ignore all laws and all treaties in wartime, and that "wartime" is now permanent, you have laid the ground for the abolition of the American experiment in self-government. Imagine another terror attack, with Rudy Giuliani as president, and a mandate to arrest and torture at will, with no need to follow or even address the rule of law. We would no longer be a republic. We would be in a protectorate of one man.

America is in danger. And the danger is coming increasingly from within. This was Osama bin Laden’s hope and plan – to destroy this country’s freedom. He has been more successful than he could have imagined. And he’s still alive to enjoy it.

(Photo of Donald Rumsfeld who personally monitored the torture of some detainees by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty.)

Scientists are making a new human being – by manipulating the old one:

For six weird weeks in the fall of 2004, Udo Wächter had an unerring sense of direction. Every morning after he got out of the shower, Wächter, a sysadmin at the University of Osnabrück in Germany, put on a wide beige belt lined with 13 vibrating pads — the same weight-and-gear modules that make a cell phone judder. On the outside of the belt were a power supply and a sensor that detected Earth’s magnetic field. Whichever buzzer was pointing north would go off. Constantly.

"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn’t get lost, even in a completely new place."

The effects of the "feelSpace belt" — as its inventor, Osnabrück cognitive scientist Peter König, dubbed the device — became even more profound over time. König says while he wore it he was "intuitively aware of the direction of my home or my office. I’d be waiting in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think: I live over there." On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake.

You can learn to see with your tongue as well. Trippy.

A fact of modern life. But, with new opinion surveys from the workplace, some people are trying to figure out how to alleviate them.